Articles

An analytical focus on the war in Sudan which, since 2023, has already resulted in tens of thousands of deaths and millions of displaced people, with a particularly overwhelming human cost in Darfur, where mass violence, sieges, and forced displacement have taken on a dimension that many international actors now qualify as genocidal. Sudan did not collapse all at once. It unravelled in successive layers, to the rhythm of a war that aims neither at the lasting seizure of power nor the reconstruction of a political order, but the gradual exhaustion of what still remains of the state. Since April 2023, violence has established itself there as a regime in itself, transforming the country into a fragmented space where the long duration of the conflict counts more than any specific military victory.

The Louvre Abu Dhabi is a universal art museum located on Saadiyat Island, the aptly named 'Island of Happiness', which aims to become the new cultural center of the UAE. With its temporary exhibitions co-organized with major French museums and its 'universal' discourse, the museum contributes to the soft power of the United Arab Emirates and to the redefinition of the Arab world's place in international art and heritage circuits. The origins The Louvre Abu Dhabi is the result of an intergovernmental agreement between France and the United Arab Emirates, which allows the latter to use the name "Louvre" until 2047.

Who did not welcome the removal of Nicolás Maduro, the dictator who forced eight million of his compatriots, or a quarter of Venezuela's population, into exile? But does this mean that the American administration was within its rights in carrying out this audacious raid in the vicinity of Caracas? According to the 1945 United Nations Charter, which enshrines national sovereignty and guarantees peace between nations, a country can only resort to armed force in two cases: self-defense and the adoption of a Security Council resolution authorizing it. A country can, however, intervene in the territory of another to respond to the urgent request of its legitimate government: Wasn't it that US Marines landed on our shores in 1958 at the request of President Camille Chamoun?

The brutal repression unleashed by the mullahs and the Pasdaran to neutralize the courageous revolution of Iranian citizens bears the hallmarks inherent to every dictatorship. More than 30,000 dead, 40,000 imprisoned whose fate remains unknown, an incalculable number of missing persons—and the figures will only rise as the macabre truth gradually comes to light. Very quickly, terror replaced the long-awaited hope for change. Order seems to reign once again, but at what price—and above all, for how long? In the absence of a united opposition, the medieval and corrupt dictatorial regime has free rein to set fire to and spill the blood of anything that moves. Methodically, viciously, savagely, without the slightest scruple. The only lifeline to which the majority of Iranians cling remains a possible American intervention, though no one knows in advance what its consequences might be, either internally or regionally.

A dark corridor, the smell of dampness emanating from it, a broken or unpowered elevator, dirty stairs, then another dark corridor, strewn with coffee cups whose grounds have splashed the floor, empty water bottles, crushed cigarette butts... There, in an office plunged into darkness, a rickety chair awaits its occupant, who settles in, waiting for the generator to deign to light up the premises. Then there was light, revealing the decrepitude. This is not the setting of a post-apocalyptic film, but indeed that of the Palace of Justice in the city that the poet Nonnus of Panopolis, in the 5th century, named guarantor of order and mother of laws: Berytus Nutrix Legum.

Every twenty years, a gambler arrives, who stakes the country, its people, its inheritance, sunrises and sunsets, boys and girls, waves and sea on a poker table. Nizar Qabbani Thus, Naïm Qassem seeks to sacrifice Lebanon for Iran. After sending his followers to die for Assad’s Syria, after allowing the inhabitants of his revolutionary home to be atomized for Hamas, he now seeks to conclude in style, through a collective suicide, at a moment when the Iranian mother-house itself is under threat, facing the supposedly invincible armada deployed by Donald Trump in the waters of the Middle East. The latest statements by Hezbollah’s Secretary-General might almost pass for the bravado of a hardened strongman—and perhaps they still do for part of his flock, weaned on the myth of the Aryan Übermensch manufactured by Iranian clerics. Yet this so-called “bravery”—once acknowledged in the late 1990s by the vast majority of Lebanese when it came to defending Lebanese territory against Israeli occupation—has since degenerated into strategic suicide, even if the word “strategic” itself now sounds grotesque in this context.